Rage rooms!
They’re an up-and-coming attraction for adults just
looking to blow off a little bit of steam.
You, too, could get into a room where you
demolish and destroy just anything you want
with no consequences and, best part,
no cleanup.
Just pay a few bucks and you get to enjoy
a smashing experience with all your best friends.
I'm not in an official rage room.
This is...
well, it’s just my garage, but
ya know, we’re simulating the experience.
The first rage room opened up in 2008 in Japan.
Of course.
But now they just seem to be popping up all over.
I mean, there may be one right near you.
If I were a betting man, I would guess that
rage rooms are gonna become the new escape room.
And soon, we're gonna see people hosting
rage sessions for their bachelor parties and
family get-togethers and
employee team building activities.
Nothing like seeing your coworkers wreck stuff, right?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these rage rooms
promote their services as rejuvenating.
This kind of anger expression is good for you.
So they say that it benefits your mental health by
lowering your anxiety, relieving stress,
lowering your blood pressure,
oh, and helps you prevent burnout at work.
Well in that case, it’s sort of a “smash therapy”.
Oh, there’s even memberships as cheap as $100 a year
so you can smash every weekend if you want.
Which is definitely something your mom would be into.
Woah!
Sorry about that.
That was...really mean.
Well anyway, this sounds great, but...
Well hang on a second, let’s take a look
at these websites once more.
Hmmm...mmhmm...
Oh, that’s what I thought.
They didn’t cite their sources.
So, could this actually be helpful?
Is rage therapy a “thing”?
Looks like we’ll have to do a little bit of our own research.
Let’s trash some more household goods.
It’s a well-known suggestion that,
if you feel angry, you should just
scream into your pillow or
punch your pillow.
Man, if pillows could talk, they would...
well, they’d probably tell us how much we hurt them.
But the idea behind this age-old advice is
that pent-up anger is bad.
You don’t want to let it build and build until you
explode and punch your coworker in the face.
So instead, take it out on something that
won’t get you in trouble.
Like a pillow!
This concept of releasing anger, or
any emotion for that matter, is called catharsis.
And the “catharsis hypothesis” has been
used in therapy since the days of Freud.
It’s hotly debated whether the expression
of repressed or ignored emotions helps us
address those underlying feelings.
Aggression is its own subtype of catharsis
with a wide range of behaviors, including
playing violent video games and
taking somebody to court.
But, since we’re talking about rage rooms today,
I’m gonna specifically focus on aggressive acts
like yelling, slamming doors,
destroying property, and hitting things.
The idea of releasing your anger as a
psychological treatment really came into popularity
in the 60s and 70s with the birth of Primal Therapy.
This form of treatment believed that
mental health issues were caused by
repressed childhood traumas that had
not yet been resolved.
So, to resolve them, therapists helped clients
re-experience those traumas and express their pain.
How do you do that?
Well, by screaming at the top of your lungs,
punching things, and
getting lubed up and pushed through a
10-foot long tube to re-live your birth.
It sounds wild, but folks like John Lennon,
Yoko Ono, and James Earl Jones all swore by it.
So of course you should trust them.
They’re famous.
Or, if you’re smart, then you won't trust anyone
and you'll kill your idols!
But, since that time, history has
not been kind to Primal Therapy.
Many studies looked at its efficacy
and, in 2006, the American Psychological Association
classified this form of treatment as “discredited”
due to its lack of scientific evidence.
Yikes!
Well that doesn’t seem promising for rage therapy.
But Primal Therapy had a lot of dubious practices
going on in addition to the yelling and punching.
I mean, I certainly wouldn’t want to be
squeezed through a vinyl tube.
What if we only look at the aggressive acts themselves?
Well, there is evidence that catharsis works.
In a few studies, the experimenter purposefully
annoyed or angered some participants
and then gave them the opportunity to
retaliate against the experimenter,
or someone that was related to the experimenter,
either by giving electric shocks
or harsh negative feedback.
Turns out, this kind of aggression actually
lowered the participants’ blood pressure
and heart rate back to levels before being annoyed.
I mean, that’s great!
That's good news!
However, in a followup study,
they did the same experiment, but then
let the participant attack some innocent person instead.
What they found was that,
when the person would aggress against this rando
instead of the actual experimenter,
it didn’t reduce their tension.
So it seems like catharsis works best
when it feels like we’re evening the score or
getting justice with the person who hurt us.
So just 3D print a bust of your least favorite politician,
bring it to the rage room,
and boom, have a smashing experience, right?
Should be easy as that.
Here we go.
Well...hang on.
But it turns out even this may not even be enough.
In another study with kids,
school-age children were purposefully
annoyed by older children
and then given the opportunity to take out their anger
on inanimate objects.
Kinda like a rage room.
But it didn't work.
Afterwards, those kids were just as likely
to aggress against the kid who frustrated them.
And in another study,
participants were irritated by the researcher
and then were asked to hit a punching bag
and either think about the researcher
or think about becoming physically fit.
The folks who thought about the researcher
became more aggressive.
So is catharsis only effective when you can
inflict harm directly on the person who annoyed you?
Who knows.
I happen to know.
And the answer is: not entirely.
See, there’s plenty of research to show
that blowing off steam can
reduce stress immediately afterwards.
It makes you feel good.
Well hang on a second.
I made a video a while back about
operant conditioning using my cats.
This kind of training uses rewards to
increase a particular behavior, so...
that makes me wonder,
if I feel better after expressing my anger,
then aren’t I just reinforcing that behavior?
Will that feeling just make me want to be
more angry more often?
Indeed it does, my friends.
It turns out that if you feel better after punching a wall,
well, then you’re more likely to
punch the wall again in the future.
You’ve essentially been rewarded for your actions.
So, yeah, if you go to a rage room
and you use it as an outlet for your anger,
you could be making yourself
more likely to be aggressive IRL.
But don’t take this as me being anti-rage room, okay?
I’m all for having some safe fun by defacing property
and, ya know, introducing a bit of chaos into life.
Like I was saying before, I see it along the
same lines as escape rooms or paintballing
or axe throwing.
Just don’t be an idiot and think it’ll solve
all your petty problems.
What I mean is, just don’t use it as therapy, okay?
Sorry.
Breaking all this stuff is making me aggro.
I should stop.
Well....maybe just a few more things.
Anyway, thanks for watching.
And until next time, I’m Micah.
Think about it.